Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE
elizabeth
“You know, I am sorry about your sister and Mr. Bingley,” he was saying.
The fire was burning brightly and we were sitting opposite each other, both with cups of strong tea. It was after midnight.
“You are only saying that,” I said. “I know you’re not sorry. The great and mighty Mr. Darcy never apologizes.”
He groaned. “That’s what you think of me? No wonder you don’t like me.”
I huddled into the blankets that I was wrapped up in and gazed into the fire. “Why are you sorry, then?”
“Because, you know, I am,” he said.
“Are you sorry because you don’t wish me to think badly of you, since I am the only person you really have to talk to?” I said. “Or because you genuinely caused my sister a great deal of pain, and probably Mr. Bingley, too, I warrant.”
“Pain, you say,” he said quietly. “Well, I did not think I would. She did not seem to be overly interested in him, not from the times I observed them together.”
“You don’t even know my sister,” I said, annoyed. “She’s shy.”
“Yes, I suppose,” he said. “But your mother made no secret of the fact that she would have been gratified by Bingley’s money.”
I winced, hunching down into the blankets.
“Look here, I’m not saying that I have any room to talk about embarrassing relations, now that you have met my aunt, of course.”
I lifted my face. “What?”
“Lady Catherine is ridiculousness incarnate, quite obviously,” he said. “Of course, I oughtn’t say such a thing about your mother and expect you not to take offense—”
“No, you may.” I sighed. “My mother is, yes, ridiculous.”
“We all have relations who embarrass us, that is my point,” he said. “So, it is not so much that I held your mother’s behavior against your sister, not exactly.”
“What is it, then?” I said. “She would not have been demonstrative. I tell you, she is a hesitant sort of person.”
“Yes, all right, and perhaps that would account for it.” He drank some tea. “All I meant to do was apologize.”
“But you are not sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I believe you would do it again, sir. I believe you think yourself entirely justified.”
“No,” he said with a sigh.
“What is it, then?” I repeated.
“I have truly said it all,” he said. “I believed that your sister’s motivation was primarily to attach your family to the Bingleys and to raise the station of her relations thusly. I did not believe she cared overmuch for my friend. Now, tell me, Miss Bennet, if your friend was being pursued in such a way, what would you do?”
“But that is not what what was happening,” I said. “It wasn’t…” I sighed. “You thought, then, I’m sure, that I would jump at the chance to marry you, and that’s why you proposed. For amusement.”
“I suppose I did,” he said quietly.
“You thought I would marry you for your money.”
“Connection to me would not only be financially beneficial to you, Miss Bennet, it would raise you considerably in a number of ways. Truly, is money really a concern? It is not as if you are starving.”
I scoffed. “Spoken like someone with ten thousand a year.”
“Oh, God, you have not just—”
“Apologies, apologies,” I said. It was true, that was quite gauche, what I had just said. It was not done, throwing someone’s income in their face in that manner.
“It’s a bit more than that, anyway,” he said with a smirk.
I gasped. “You are horrible!”
“I don’t mean to be, that is the thing,” he said.
“Yes, but this simply proves my point. It is just as I said this morning and every morning to Colonel Fitzwilliam. What could a rich man like yourself or like himself know of actual suffering?”
“Oh, truly, Miss Bennet, how do you suffer?”
“I suppose,” I admitted, “as of yet, I do not. But I have only about a thousand pounds to keep me after my father dies, and—”
“And you will marry someone,” he said. “Well, if you actually accept a man’s proposal, you will.”
“If I do not, though,” I said, “I shall have nothing and nowhere—”
“I am certain Mr. Collins is not going to throw you out on the streets!”
“But the indignity of it, sir,” I said in a low voice. “You will never have to lower yourself in such a way. How many houses do you own?”
He was quiet.
I looked up at him over the fire. “Well?”
“Oh, that was a true question? I am to answer? Very well. Four, if you count the house in town.”
“Four,” I breathed. “ Four. ”
“Miss Bennet, you don’t go about asking people these sorts of things. This is why Richard and I were saying you’d make an intolerable sort of wife, anyway. You have apparently no ability to keep yourself from saying things like this, and people will be offended—”
“You and the colonel were discussing marrying me?” I said in a strangled voice. Certainly, I had thought that perhaps the colonel had meant that one little comment for me, but that had been wishful thinking as much as anything. A man like Colonel Fitzwilliam would never marry someone like me.
“Of course, in a way, the fact that you’re like that, it’s why I am so drawn to you.”
“You aren’t drawn to me!”
“I am, though,” he muttered. “Heaven only knows why, I must say.”
I finished my tea and set about filling a tea ball with some tea leaves. “You are not, and I don’t know why you keep insisting such things.”
“I wonder why you won’t believe me,” he said. “I think it’s because you’re frightened that you’ll have to feel guilty about how rude you are to me if you come to understand that we do not have a mutual dislike. You don’t like me, but I don’t know how to make you understand that I like you. I’ve said it rather often, haven’t I?”
“I said I would attempt to like you,” I said with a sigh. I had to admit I wasn’t attempting it very successfully, was I?
“But then, that’s part of it, too,” he said with a little wondering laugh. “I suppose I hadn’t quite conceived of being refused if I proposed marriage, you know. I mean, if I asked a princess or the daughter of a duke or something, she’d say no. But most people are lower than me socially, and so most people would say yes. They would flatter me. They would fall all over themselves trying to secure me. Not you, though, Miss Bennet. Not you.”
I lifted the ladle out of the pot on the fire and poured boiling water over the tea ball in the tea pot. It would need to steep. “You like me because it’s rare that anyone dislikes you? That’s what you’re saying?”
“Sort of.”
“The truth is, Mr. Darcy, lots of people dislike you. They are just afraid to show you.”
“Yes!” He barked out a laugh.
“Why is that funny?”
“Well, I like your honesty,” he said. “And I can trust you, do you see? Other people hide their negative impressions of me, but you don’t, so I know you’re telling me the truth.”
“Oh, yes, I suppose I see that.” I nodded. “And my sister Jane, she is not the sort of girl who would pretend either. She wouldn’t pretend to care about Mr. Bingley simply to get a marriage proposal.”
“No, I’m saying—”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“I’m saying that I think your mother would,” he said.
I winced again and I could not find the voice to contradict this.
“And I think your mother might put pressure on her daughters to do it as well. And your sister, Miss Jane, she doesn’t seem to have nearly the backbone you do.”
“Well, I suppose she doesn’t,” I admitted. “Yes, I suppose I could see why you would think that. My mother was a bit horrid, especially at the ball at Netherfield.”
“Only a bit?”
I cringed.
“Sorry, I’m being too hard on your mother, I think.” He upended his tea cup into his mouth, draining it. He yawned. “Are we brewing more tea?”
“Yes, we are,” I said.
“Good,” he said and stifled another yawn.
I yawned too. Yawns were like that. If someone else yawned, you also yawned. I checked the tea, but I could not say if it was ready or not. “Do you have your pocket watch with you?” I remembered that he had one. When he proposed to me, he had been toying with it nervously, actually, opening and shutting it but not really looking at it as he went on and on about the vast cavern of distance between our stations in society.
“Yes, why?”
“Because you can tell me when five minutes have passed and then the tea should be done,” I said.
“Actually, I don’t know where it is,” he said, coming out of his cocoon of blankets to look in all of his pockets. “I don’t even remember the last time I looked at it.”
“Oh, well,” I said.
“That’s odd, though,” he said. “That’s very odd. I’m trying to remember if I had this morning. You see, usually, my valet gives it to me. And actually, this watch, it isn’t even my watch. I found it in a drawer in my bedchamber.”
“So, you simply stole it?” I said.
“No, it was more that I was just…” He was quiet. “The watch is a bit odd, in fact. I had this urge, when I saw it, to take it, you know?”
“No, I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had an urge to take a watch.”
“I’m a bit disturbed that it’s missing,” he said.
“I think the tea is done,” I said, because I did not see why we were making such a fuss over this watch.
“Yes, all right,” he said.
I poured it out for both of us.
We drank, gazing at each other over the fire.
“So, I think the way I’m meant to understand it, sir,” I said finally, “is that you like me, and you even find me pretty, but you think I’d be an intolerable sort of wife. So, you like me, but not like that.”
He cleared his throat. “No wonder you don’t like me, Miss Bennet.”
“Mmm?” I was confused.
“I shouldn’t say things the way I say them,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said you’d make an intolerable wife. You’d… I’m sure there would be a number of very pleasant things about being married to you.”
I clutched my tea tightly. “You are exceedingly confusing, sir.”
“If there were only you and me in the world, Miss Bennet, of course I should marry you,” he said. “That is, if you actually liked me.” He laughed. “It’s only about them, you see, about what everyone thinks. If none of that mattered…”
I sipped my tea. It was very quiet, because I was thinking that it was basically like that now. No one could judge us, because it was just him and me, living this day over and over again.
“Well,” he said, “how can I make you like me?”
I felt flustered. I sipped at my tea. “But it is that , sir. That is the reason why I don’t like you.”
“What is?”
“The fact you are so concerned with what everyone thinks about you. About propriety. About living up to expectations. And about treating everyone below you as if they don’t even matter.”
“Now, wait a moment,” he said. “The last thing you just said is not fair.”
“Oh, isn’t it?”
He groaned. “This is about Mr. Wickham.”
I drew in a breath. “I suppose you don’t wish to talk about that.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “In a way, you are right. It is the possible censure of others that he holds over me. It is my family’s reputation that he threatened, and he went at us through my very young and very innocent sister, and… but what does it matter now? I am separated from her. She is far off, all alone. I left her. Maybe I was angry with her, even though I never blamed her, not truly. But maybe I was still angry, even though she didn’t deserve it. No, no, it’s him I reserve all my ire for, of course.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said quietly.
“Oh, no,” he said. “You don’t know him well, I suppose. But he is always concerned, one way or the other, with getting money for himself. It is all he thinks of. I suppose he’d like to rise, too, above his station in life, but then he has quite managed that . You welcomed him into your social circle as if I should consider him my equal.”
“Oh, no one is your equal,” I muttered sarcastically. “Just daughters of dukes and princesses, who might rightly turn down your marriage proposal. Heaven forbid you break bread with the son of one of your family’s servants.”
He sighed.
“And I don’t suppose I really saw him going after money, really. Well, there was the engagement with Miss King, I suppose, but I just saw that as practicality. After all, lots of people get married for practical reasons, and I never had any real conviction that he even thought of me in that way, and—”
“Thought of you in—oh, that’s disgusting.” Mr. Darcy got up from the fire, throwing off his blankets, and stalked over to me. “You had some sort of love affair with Mr. Wickham. Did he touch you?”
I wrapped the blankets around myself even tighter, looking up at him as he loomed over me, illuminated in the firelight. “I had nothing of the sort. He didn’t love me, and I never thought of him except with friendly regard.”
He folded his arms over his chest. “Did he touch you?”
I sputtered up at him. “I mean it, Mr. Darcy, he and I never had many interactions at all. Of course, everyone thought he favored me, but I knew he didn’t. Everyone was conciliatory when he was engaged to someone else, but I never thought any of his behavior had indicated any kind of promise towards me.”
“So, that would mean, no? He didn’t touch you.”
I glared at him.
He raised his eyebrows, his expression fierce.
“I don’t know what you even mean by it,” I finally said. “If you mean, untoward touching, obviously not, but he helped me down from a carriage once, I think. He may have kissed the back of my hand once, but it was in jest. He was pretending to be—”
“That blackguard.” Mr. Darcy was not angry, but resigned, his voice deep and lethal. He stalked back around the fire. He did not sit down but gazed off into the distance, his nostrils flaring.
“You’re ever so hard on him,” I said.
Mr. Darcy let out a harsh noise that might have been termed a laugh. Then he sat down again, gathering up his blankets. “I have determined I shall stay here, with you, to finish this ill-formed experiment in drinking tea until sunrise. And then, I don’t know, I shall probably sleep through Thursday, but the following Thursday, I am going to go and kill him.”
“Mr. Darcy! ” I was appalled. “This is the second time you’ve said this.”
“Won’t mean anything, because I rather suspect he’ll just be alive the following day,” he said, baring his teeth. “Maybe I’ll make a habit of it. Maybe I’ll kill him every day for a week of Thursdays. Maybe I’ll—”
“You are frightening me,” I whispered.
He made that noise, that not-laugh again. He fixed his gaze on me. “Do you know what he did to my sister? Did he speak to you of her?”
“Erm, once, I suppose,” I said, remembering. “He said that they were close when she was young, but that now she was very, very proud.”
“Oh, did he?” Mr. Darcy’s face twisted, shaking his head.
“He said she was fifteen or sixteen,” I said. “That would make her Lydia’s age, but you, sir, you are older than I, so there must be a bit of distance between your ages?”
“Yes, I was twelve when she was born,” he said. “She has only recently turned sixteen. When he did it, she was fifteen, and I don’t care how young it is that other people see fit to marry off women, that is too young, so—”
“Wait a moment,” I said. “You are saying, he… with your sister?”
“Tried to elope with her,” he said. “Not because he cares for her, no, but because he wished to take charge of her fortune. She has a dowry, you know. He made certain to make it look a certain way, also. He spent a night in her room and her companion, the governess I had engaged to look after her, that woman seemed to be in league with him on it. My sister says that they only slept, that he didn’t…”
I found that I did not know what to say.
This must be a falsehood, I thought. This must not be true. This cannot be true.
“But I suppose it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Because he has the means to ruin her now, if he should ever tell anyone what occurred. For some reason, he’s kept his awful mouth shut about her. I don’t know if he thinks it will save him or not. The colonel and I, when we went after him, Miss Darcy was our primary concern. We let him slip away, and then he turned up in the damnable militia at Meryton of all places. I should have killed him then, I suppose. At the time, it seemed so messy. He has styled himself as if he’s a gentleman, and what am I to do? Challenge him to a duel? He doesn’t deserve that. He’s a thief, is what he is. But if I just shoot him down like a thief, or string him up, then I must tell everyone what I am about, and then I must ruin my own sister. So, therefore, I say nothing. I do nothing. And he does whatever he likes.”
I was silent. I gulped at my tea.
He wasn’t even holding his tea anymore. He glared into the fire, and neither of us said anything.
My mind was racing, because I did not know what to think. It seemed entirely wrong, that was the truth of it. I had thought Mr. Wickham to be the perfect picture of what a gentleman should be. He was so well-mannered, never gruff or silent like Mr. Darcy. He was polite and handsome and complimentary. Mr. Darcy said all manner of uncomplimentary things, and he was so very arrogant.
Yes, Mr. Wickham liked you or acted as though he did, and Mr. Darcy did not. Perhaps you are simply shallow, Elizabeth.
“We should not speak of this,” said Mr. Darcy abruptly.
I lifted my gaze to his. “Should we not?”
“We shall not make it to sunrise if we keep at such topics,” he said. “I am very out of sorts now.”
I wanted to ask about the inheritance that Mr. Wickham claimed he was owed, that he claimed that Mr. Darcy had prevented him from receiving. I wanted to ask other questions.
But even now, I was realizing that Mr. Wickham had once told me he would never harm the reputation of the younger Mr. Darcy because of the love he bore the man’s father, and that Mr. Wickham had done nothing but slander the son, no matter what nobility he had claimed, what devotion.
And I did not wish to have any more of those revelations, so I reached down to bring out two books I had brought along. “Yes, I thought we might grow bored with each other’s company. I brought these in case we would like something to amuse ourselves. I thought we could take it in turns reading aloud from them.”
“Ah, that’s brilliant, Miss Bennet,” he said, sounding relieved, sounding grateful. “Hand that over to me. I shall read first, if you like.”
“Which book should—”
“Doesn’t matter. Either one.” He beckoned with his fingers, agitated.
Maybe it was the tea. We had been drinking ever so much tea. It kept one awake, but it did tend to make one a bit excitable also if one overindulged.